Salem, South Dakota: Hotbed of Hamiltonian Treatises, OJ, and Tits

As I perused today's crop of potential HoB material, I came across an article regarding an interesting dispute between a businessman and the community of Salem, South Dakota. The former, Bob Rieger, attempted to open a bar some time ago in this sleepy community (all communities in South Dakota are sleepy; must be something in the air over there), but his request to obtain a liquor license was denied. So Rieger, stuck with a useless property and no way to turn a profit, did the next best thing: he turned the place into a topless juice bar.

Unfortunately, the community didn't accept his venture warmly. Instead, the community formed a 15-member group known as "Citizens Against Nude Juicebars and Pornography" (seriously, that's the name they've chosen for themselves) and have spent the past couple years trying to put Rieger's adult business out of business.

They've gone after him in court under the cover of a few different laws. One instance was the bar being physically located in an agriculture business zone; he met them in court and won. Subsequent attempts to put him out of business included passing an anti-nudity ordinance; his response was to utilize the loophole that exempted movie theaters from said ordinance, so in addition to juice and topless women, he also shows movies (adult, according to the article) and continues to operate.

Meanwhile, the CANJaP (the 15-member panel) organized demonstrations in front of his business and has, recently, begun filming people in the parking lot. One horrified member of the panel, co-founder and Salem hair salon owner Maxine Pulse, says she saw men drinking and urinating in the parking lot and dancers coming to the door nude. Personally, I'm not into seeing men drink and urinate, but the nude welcome-wagon is a nice touch; way to go, Bob.

Personally, this doesn't have the blow-up-my-skirt excitement of the Burr-Hamilton duel that took the latter's life many years ago; however, it does very closely resemble the Supreme Court case that is known as National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, 432 U.S. 43 (1977). That case was based on the Nazi Party of Chicago looking to march in Skokie, Illinois, which, at the time, a majority of which was comprised of former concentration camp prisoners and their families, making the location even more morally repugnant to the inhabitants of the village. Its similarity to this situation is striking, except for the fact that the Nazis, presumably, didn't march topless.

The obvious fact is that the community doesn't want an adult-oriented business in its confines, and, based on the Supreme Court's establishment of Community Standards theory, a community does have the right to legally bar certain types of businesses from operating within its borders. However, that legal protection also applies to Rieger: he should be allowed to operate his business if it adheres to local community standards. It's the same mentality that, virtually overnight, transformed Times Square in NYC from one big pornographic hellhole into a sugary Disneyland.

So the short and long of it is it's an old-fashioned Mexican stand-off, American-style. Never mind the indelible damage kids in that community will suffer knowing some of their parents were part of a group which named itself "Citizens Against Nude Juicebars and Pornography;" never mind that that Rieger feels like they're really targeting him ("At this point, it's harassment," Rieger says. "They're really picking on me."). Never mind that the latest round of back-and-forth includes the requirement that the women working at Rieger's juice bar wear "pasties" -- which is part of the newest statute designed to limit or eliminate Rieger's business. "McCook County State's Attorney Roger Gerlach says the proposed ordinance is not an attempt to put [Rieger] out of business: 'As long as they have some opaque clothing over the crucial parts of the human body, they can dance all they want.'"

Community standards are an important part of American towns and villages policing themselves, ie insuring their communities aren't transformed from family-safe havens for bible-loving people to denizens of pornographic and vulgar behavior. So this battle of wills is, at the same time, a legitimate disagreement between two sides looking to preserve what they feel is appropriate. Reading the article at CNN.com reminded me that Alexander Hamilton's Federalist No. 10, a component of the Federalist Papers, was and is a crucial part of how we as a society function under the governance of a complex but well-thought out laws. Federalist No. 10 discussed the concept of factions, ie groups with specific interests, and advised that said factions be used to play against one another in a check-and-balance role, to establish the proper, prevailing notion of right, whether involving topless women with or without pasties, public nudity, or the proper amount of tax on British Tea being sold in and around Boston Harbor.

So while this, on the surface, appears to be another example of The Drama Americana gone awry, I was a bit taken aback by the fact that "our founding fathers" were able to create a government that foresaw squabbles like this (not necessarily pertaining to pasties, of course) and were able to form a construct that enabled the government to allow the People to find the way to solve the problem rather than to simply implement laws prohibiting or governing everything from coffee that is served too hot, women sporting pasties and serving up pomegrenate juice, or a distinctly un-American group marching to offend an entire community which, a generation prior, saw the idols of those marching murder the community's elders.

So simultaneously, it's a battle of Hamiltonian proportions, yet at the same time, it manages to include topless women wearing pasties.

Either the Founding Fathers of this nation were geniuses, or they really liked boobs.

Or both.

URL:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/02/02/nude.juice.bar.ap/index.html